Report for ACL 2007 Student Research Workshop
Student Chairs: Violeta Seretan (violeta.seretan@lettres.unige.ch),
Chris Biemann (biem@informatik.uni-leipzig.de) Faculty Advisor: Ellen
Riloff (riloff@cs.utah.edu)
1. Program Committee
The co-chairs of the ACL 2007 Student Research Workshop are Violeta
Seretan (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and Chris Biemann
(University of Leipzig, Germany). Ellen Riloff (University of Utah,
USA) is the Faculty Advisor. The program committee was formed by the
co-chairs by asking previous SRW reviewers, previous SRW participants
and other researchers from the community. The final program committee
consists of 52 reviewers, of which 26 were students or young
researchers and 26 were senior researchers.
2. Paper Submission and Acceptance
We received 52 submissions from 22 countries (see Table 1). All papers
were assigned 3 reviewers (at least 1 senior and 1 student reviewer).
We accepted 16 papers, of which 9 are regular (oral) presentations and
7 are posters.
Country/Region submissions accepted
-----------------------------------------
Brazil 1 -
China 6 -
Czech Republic 1 -
France 6 -
Germany 3 -
Hungary 1 1
Italy 1 -
India 2 -
Iran 1 -
Ireland 3 2
Nepal 1 -
New Zealand 1 1
The Netherlands 2 2
Palestine 1 -
Poland 3 2
Russia 1 -
Spain 2 -
Sweden 3 1
Switzerland 2 1
UK 6 4
Ukraine 1 -
USA 4 2
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TOTAL 52 16
Table 1: Submission and acceptance by countries
3. Presentation Format
The Student Research Workshop posters are included together with the
main conference poster session on Day 1 of ACL. We made sure that the
student posters are presented next to the main conference posters, and
can be kept hanging the whole conference.
The regular (oral) presentations are held as a parallel track on site
on Day 2. Each oral presentation consists of 15 minutes of talk, and 5
minutes each for panelist feedback and for general audience questions.
4. Panelists
The co-chairs asked senior conference attendees to be on the panel to
provide feedback to student authors. All papers received one or two
panelists. These 19 panelists were selected for their knowledge in the
area and availability during the workshop.
5. Funding
We submitted our request to the National Science Foundation in January
2007 and received the award in April 2007. The grant totaled $22,200,
of which $18,000 was budgeted for student travel and $4,200 was
budgeted for administrative costs associated with running the workshop
(e.g., facility rentals, workshop proceedings, student lunch). We
will be able to provide funds to every SRW participant. Because the cost
of traveling to Prague varies depending on the student's location, the
level of funding is determined based on the cost of travel. We will award
a guaranteed $800 in funds to students from Europe, $1,800 to students from
North America and $2,000 for students from Australia/New Zealand. The rest of
$2,000 will be used to cover the student co-chairs registration and will serve
as a buffer for extra expenses. The remaining funds will be allocated to those
students that did not manage to cover all costs with their allotted funds.
6. Organization and Planning
The Workshop was publicized by sending CFPs to mailing lists of
computational linguistics and related fields, as well as direct emails to
professors at various departments. The availability of funding appears
to be an important incentive for submissions, and we found it was
important to include some funding information on the CFPs. The
Workshop webpage was placed prominently on the main conference
website. In addition, the ACL Newsletters helped to disseminate
information on the Student Research Workshop. We are grateful to the
main conference organizers for the support. The entire submission and
review process was managed by the START system. This system proved
immensely helpful for managing the 52 submissions and 52 reviewers.
Before sending out acceptance and reject letters, we double-checked
with the main conference organizers to avoid double acceptance. We
rejected two papers that have been published at other events without
considerable changes.
7. Suggestions and Considerations
a) We believe that the success of the Student Research Workshop
depends on the quality of the reviewer and panelist feedback to
students. We were happy to find 52 reviewers and 19 panelists who are
supportive of this educational goal. The community was very
responsive, which shows that the Student Research Workshop is widely
accepted and recognized. Also for students whose work could not be
accepted, the elaborate reviews will be of great help. We recommend
that future Workshop organizers continue the tradition of
concentrating their efforts on assembling good reviewers and panelists.
b) For many Workshop presenters, this is their first major conference
attendance. Therefore, we thought it would beneficial for students if
we could arrange their poster/regular sessions early during the
conference, such that they can begin networking and get the most out
of the duration of the conference. We suggest that future Workshop
planners communicate with the main conference organizers in the early
stages of planning to ensure that the logistics for this situation
works out. Both oral and poster presentations were scheduled and
located to make the SRW look like a part of the main conference rather
than a separate event. We believe this is beneficial for the students,
as they get more attention from the general audience.
c) This year, the submission deadline as well as the notification of
acceptance for the SRW was set to be at the same time as that of the
main conference. We did receive papers that indicated double
submissions, but not to ACL main session and the SRW. Although we
clearly stated that double sumbission has to be labelled as such, some
students did not consider previously published papers as double
submissions and found it hard to understand why their papers were
rejected once we found out by manually checking the web. In the
future, this point should be made even more explicit in the Call for
Papers.
d) We set the camera-ready deadline one week before the deadline for
the main conference. As nearly all papers needed adjustments, which
took until two weeks past the deadline to finish, this proved to be a
necessary means that is highly recommended to the next organizers.
e) In the Call for Papers, we aimed at early stage Ph.D. work and
suggested that advanced students should submit to the main
conference. We believe this is a necessary contrast to NAACL's
Doctoral Consortium, and suggest to do so in subsequent
years. However, about half of the submissions were at too early a stage
and could not even fill 4 out of a maximum number of 6 pages, which
imposed extra work on reviewers, as most of these papers were clear
rejects both formally and by content. We suggest to provide a minimum
page number in the Call for Papers to avoid this.
f) Since our funding came from the National Science Foundation, in
order for students to be reimbursed for their airfare their flights
had to comply with the Fly America Act. This essentially means that
the flights have to be on a U.S. carrier or code-shared by a
U.S. carrier, unless no such options are available (there are a few
exceptions, primarily when the travel time would be dramatically
increased). This caused some confusion among students, especially
those traveling entirely within Europe, because they weren't sure if
there were any "acceptable" flights or because the acceptable flights
were a lot more expensive than an "unacceptable" flight. Our solution
was to run their flight plans by a travel agent at the University of
Utah who determined whether their flights were acceptable or
not. However, this solution introduced lag time before the students
could book their flights and it was a bit cumbersome for the travel
agent.